Post navigation

The disappearing women

At LitHub, author Dorthe Nors writes about the conundrum that so many middle-age women face.

“I write books about middle-aged, childless women on the brink of disappearing—or you could say—on the brink of losing their license to live. If a woman has kids, she will always be a mother, but a woman who has chosen not to procreate and who now no longer is young and sexy is perceived by many as a pointless being.”

Later on in her article, Nors says that a journalist told once told her that she was glad that she writes about middle-aged women without children because “there are so many of us, and because it quite often feels as if we’re not really here.”Photo: A still from “Another Year”, dir. Mike Leigh (2010).

Also at LitKub, Bernadette Murphy writes about the absence of women in the literature of American adventure;

“In American letters, there are plenty of male adventure tales unspooling on our nation’s highways and byways…(but) the story of a woman on the road—joyfully, expansively, freely, experiencing this land in the way these male authors do—it turns out, is a rare thing.”

There are exceptions, she says. For example:

Wild, Cheryl Strayed

Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, lauded by Oprah and made into a feature film starring Reese Witherspoon, tells of the author’s life-enhancing and resolve-testing solo trek along the Pacific Crest Trail in an effort to reclaim the woman she had been.

~~~~~
Women may be mostly absent on the road, but when it comes to other books, Terrence Rafferty writes at The Atlantic,

Women Are Writing the Best Crime Novels

They don’t seem to believe in heroes as much as their male counterparts, which in some ways makes their storytelling a better fit for the times, Rafferty writes in his article, adding:

“When in doubt,” Raymond Chandler once told his genre brethren, “have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.” When today’s crime writers are in doubt, they have a woman come through the door with a passive-aggressive zinger on her lips…their books are light on gunplay, heavy on emotional violence.

Death, in (some) women’s books, is often chillingly casual, and unnervingly intimate.

As a character in Alex Marwood’s brilliant new novel, The Darkest Secret, muses: “They’re not always creeping around with knives in dark alleyways. Most of them kill you from the inside out.”